Clueless in US

Ten years after invading Iraq, the US is winding down the war. America has no appetite for a conflict, although warmongers in Washington are scrapping for a new fight

Tell me, why is the United States’s war against Iraq called the “Iraq War” and not the “USIraq war” like it is with, say, Sino-Japanese wars or India-Pakistan wars? Likewise, why is it just “Vietnam War” and “Korean War” ? How does the US get to de-hyphenate itself from wars it initiates? Because Americans want to dissociate themselves from what they wrought? Because history is written by victors? Because, as the world’s most fearsome warmonger, the US’s role is assumed, and doesn’t need to be mentioned?

Mull over all this while we reel back to visit the “Iraq War” , one of the more recent cock-ups in the American March of Folly, on the upcoming 10th anniversary (on March 20) of the US invasion of Iraq. Its reverberations are still heard in occasional bomb blasts in Baghdad (and Karbala and Mosul and other towns which were seldom heard about before 2003). Thanks to US action, the world knows a lot more about the Shia-Sunni divide; terms like “shock and awe” , “surge” , and “regime change” have entered war lexicon; and the Middle East is in ever greater ferment, hopes of a transition to a new democratic dawn largely unrealised. Here’s how it rolled out a decade ago.

It had been some 18 months since Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda attacked America in a catastrophic terrorist strike that had Saudi and Pakistani fingerprints all over it. But George W Bush, in his dubious (or Dubya’s ) wisdom, received from neo-conservative wingnuts like Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Perle and others, decided that Saddam Hussein was going to pay for it. All kinds of reasons were invented to justify taking US eyes off Pakistan and Afghanistan (or Af-Pak , as it lately came to be known) and focusing on Iraq. The propaganda machine was cranked up. That Saddam was closely linked to bin Laden and al-Qaeda . That he was making or had made weapons of mass destruction. That if he was not tackled there and then and finished off, something his (Bush’s ) father had failed to do, America and its client states would pay a heavy prize in the future.

“… for the sake of protecting our friends and allies, the United States will lead a mighty coalition of freedom-loving nations and disarm Saddam Hussein. See, I can’t imagine what was going through the mind of this enemy when they hit us,” George Bush said in the months leading up to the invasion, glibly linking Saddam to 9/11. “They probably thought the national religion was materialism, that we were so selfish and so self-absorbed that after 9/11 this mighty nation would take a couple of steps back and file a lawsuit.”

In fact, a lawsuit or its equivalent, a UN inspection, was what was under way at that time with regards to Saddam’s suspected WMD programme. The then UN secretary general Kofi Annan counselled restraint, urging Washington to allow UN inspectors to finish their job, which if US suspicions were proved right, could end in Iraq being disarmed peacefully. But the urge to surge was so great that no words of caution were needed, much less heeded. Washington cranked up its war machine. It would be done and dusted in weeks, if not days.

“Liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk,” said Kenneth Adelman, a leading neocon and member of Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. “Five days or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last longer,” forecast Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, estimating the war would cost under $50 billion. “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators … I think it will go relatively quickly … [in] weeks rather than months,” crowed Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Good Golly, Miss Folly, I muttered under my breath, mixing up Barbara Tuchman and Little Richard.

In the days leading to the war, I had decamped from Washington DC for World Cup Cricket in South Africa. The Indian team had won some eight games on the trot after I reached there, allowing me to brag about being the team mascot. We were gee-ing up for the final against Australia when I was asked to wing it back to the US. George Bush had basically given Saddam Hussein a 48-hour deadline to die, because, I wrote during a layover in London, the “Tikriti tribal code by which Saddam Hussein and his clan live does not allow such dishonour” as surrender. Even the Americans expected him to reject the ultimatum.

War was hours away when I returned to DC, but the city was normal. While in Baghdad people were stoically preparing for war, taping windows, shuttering shops, and stowing away food and goods in underground rooms and bunkers, Washington went about its usual business of jaw-jawing about war, secure across many seas, although the domestic terror code had been increased from yellow to orange. By then, war had already become a television spectacle (it began during the first Gulf War). There was this shameful collective glee and vulgar relish in many media quarters about the impending fireworks over Baghdad.

There was also some sobering disquiet and occasional dissent; this should be recorded because the general impression worldwide is that all Americans credulously backed an unjust war. Many didn’t , but they were admittedly in a minority. In my own neck of the woods, school kids from a local high school protested against the war. In fact, even as the bombs were being loaded, there was a hearing on the Hill on South Asia with Christina Rocca and Wendy Chamberlain (who would later go to Pakistan as ambassador) testifying . Eni Faleomavega, an incredibly perceptive lawmaker and a Vietnam vet, who few take seriously because he is from American Samoa and is a non-voting delegate, surprised everyone with a lengthy and approving recital of India’s tormented nuclear policy, contexting it with the US policy on WMDs. “History is full of such prejudices, paraded as iron laws — that men are superior to women, that the white races are superior to the coloured, that colonialism is a civilising mission, that those who possess nuclear weapons are responsible powers, and those who do not are not,” he said, quoting Rajiv Gandhi of all people, in an unmistakably critical lament about the small cabal of unelected white men who were about to launch a terribly mistaken war. It was a voice lost in the concrete wilderness of Rayburn Building and other imposing war edifices of Washington DC. Hours later, the bombing began.

A decade later, the bills are still coming in and the toll is just a statistic. The US body count is around 4,500 American soldiers, but the Iraqi toll, mostly civilian, ranges from AP’s conservative 110,000 to Lancet’s 600,000. As for the cost, Brown University’s Costs of War Project put it this week at a staggering $2 trillion, with continuing expenses, including interest, taking it to a humongous $6 billion over the next four decades. Arguably the costliest war ever fought on the planet.

President Obama ended the Iraq War and is now winding down a more justifiable war in Afghanistan that was aimed at eliminating terrorists and flushing out toxic fundamentalists whose nihilistic credo is to destroy modernism . It’s an unfinished job, but the US has no appetite for war, for now, although there are warmongers in Washington scrapping for a new fight. Iran or North Korea? Pakistan or China? Or a small manageable enemy like Panama or Grenada that can be rolled over in a few days? The salon wisdom in Washington DC is that America can never live without war. It is a country made for war. You might have to wait a little longer, but stand by for the next one.